Lately, some discussions on Twitter/X got me thinking again about a surprisingly old educational question: is learning fundamentally social or not?

Part of the debate was triggered by discussions around AI-driven schools like Alpha School, where students spend far less time in traditional instruction and much more time in highly individualised learning environments supported by software. Some defenders of such models sometimes argue that we overestimate the importance of social interaction in learning. After all, many of the most meaningful intellectual experiences people have are solitary. Reading books. Thinking deeply. Practising alone. Wrestling with ideas internally rather than through discussion.

And I do think that there is something important in that critique.

Education has sometimes romanticised “social learning” to the point that almost any form of discussion is treated as inherently educational. But classrooms full of talk do not automatically produce understanding. Poorly structured group work can easily create the illusion of learning rather than learning itself. Students can participate actively while leaving with fragmented or superficial knowledge.

Cognitive science also clearly reminds us that learning ultimately happens in individual minds. Working memory, attention, prior knowledge and long-term memory are individual cognitive processes. Nobody can literally think for someone else.

So in that sense, yes: learning is (almost) always cognitive. But that does not necessarily make it non-social.

Because the moment we look a bit closer, the distinction becomes harder to maintain. Even solitary learning is deeply embedded in social and cultural structures. Language itself is social. Writing is social. Books are social technologies. Scientific knowledge, mathematics, literature and history are collective human constructions accumulated across generations.

Even the apparently solitary act of reading quietly depends on countless other people: authors, editors, teachers, translators, researchers and broader cultural systems that made both the text and the reader possible in the first place.

Language learning perhaps illustrates the tension best. Of course, people can study vocabulary, grammar, and texts on their own. Many do. But becoming fluent in a language usually requires interaction with other humans: interpreting intentions, adapting to responses, negotiating meaning, dealing with ambiguity and feedback in real time. You can memorise vocabulary alone. Becoming conversational is something else entirely. The cognitive processes remain individual, but the skill itself is profoundly social. That’s why some research on tutoring shows that 1-on-1 tutoring isn’t necessarily always the best option for language learning.

This is also where I think some discussions around AI and schooling risk becoming too narrow. The argument sometimes becomes: if students can acquire knowledge individually through well-designed systems, why would schools still need so much human interaction during the learning of the curriculum?

But schools were never only knowledge-delivery systems.

They are also environments where motivation, identity, attention, self-regulation, norms and aspirations develop. Those elements are not decorative extras added on top of “real learning”. They strongly shape whether learning happens at all, especially over longer periods.

A single learning moment can absolutely be solitary. But education is not a collection of isolated moments. It is developmental. The question is not whether someone can learn something alone on a Tuesday afternoon. Of course they can. The question is what kind of learners people become over the years inside particular environments.

Ironically, even many highly technologised school models seem to recognise this implicitly. They still invest heavily in mentorship, coaching, projects, motivation systems, culture-building and social activities. That alone already suggests something important: apparently, fully individualised learning environments are not sufficient on their own.

And perhaps that should not surprise us.

Humans are social creatures, but not in the simplistic sense that learning always requires constant collaboration or endless discussion. Sometimes the richest intellectual experiences are indeed solitary. A teenager absorbed in a novel. A student is slowly understanding a difficult proof. Someone is replaying an argument internally for days.

But even those moments usually emerge from a broader social and cultural ecology.

Maybe the mistake is that educational debates often force us into false binaries:

• Either learning is purely individual cognition,
• or learning is fundamentally collaborative and social.

Reality is probably messier. Learning happens in individual brains. But those brains develop within relationships, cultures, languages and institutions. Cognition matters enormously. So does the social world that shapes cognition.

And perhaps AI in education is forcing us to revisit that balance more explicitly than before. Not because the social dimension suddenly disappeared, but because new technologies make it easier to underestimate how much of learning has always been social.